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Restoring compacted emails

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traider
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Restoring compacted emails

I've lost many important emails in compacting. I assumed that when emails were compacted, they were saved somewhere else and not scrubbed. Is this the case in Thunderbird Portable and how might I retrieve them.

Thanks

Traider

Ken Herbert
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This is more to do with

This is more to do with Thunderbird itself, not the portable version, but a brief look on Google brings up this

Undoing compacting

You cannot undo compacting, there is no such thing as "uncompacting". Compacting physically removes messages marked for deletion and hidden from view. Once they're gone, they're gone. Usually when somebody asks how to "uncompact" a folder they lost messages due to compacting. Sometimes the messages were already gone, but that wasn't noticeable because they were still listed in the folder listing. Other times compacting a folder physically removed messages it shouldn't have because the folder was too corrupt.
If you suspect a folder is badly corrupted, don't compact it. It might make things worse because compacting depends upon Thunderbird being able to parse the mbox file (the text file named after the folder that contains all of the messages for that folder) and figure out where every message begins and ends. Thunderbird can't use the so-called index file (folder_name.msf) to do this. Once Thunderbird starts to lose track of where each message begins and ends, compacting can cause the physical removal of other messages because it thinks other messages are part of the deleted message. It's unusual but possible to lose every message in a folder by compacting it if the folder was badly corrupted.

from the mozillaZine article on compacting folders.

skysmum
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Losing compacted emails

Like Traider I also lost some important emails a few weeks ago after hitting the compact button, after this I backup my thunderbird portable to a usb stick once a week and when it happened again this morning did not lose so much this time around. This seems to be the only solution to this glitch in thunderbird
Regards
skysmum

J Neutron
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Glitch?

Glitch in Thunderbird? It sounds more like that Thunderbird is behaving as designed and the glitch is PEBCAK.

neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com

Simeon
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yes

it should only compyct the email files (=delete the deleted email from the file) and not result in lost emails.

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate

J Neutron
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Maybe auto-deleted?

Tools > Account Settings > Local Folders > Disk Space

Settings here can make Thunderbird delete "old" messages. Compacting then permanently deletes messages marked for deletion.

neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com

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